Generation Iraq: The Journalists Who Covered America’s War

Nuristan, Afghanistan, 2007. A helicopter comes to land on an impromptu helipad built into the side of the mountain at the outpost of Aranas. Peter van Agtmael/Magnum.

“From the American invasion of Iraq nine years ago this spring through occupation and the official end of the U.S. mission last December, a generation of news professionals—reporters, photographers, translators and fixers—told the story of the Iraq war for the rest of us,” Bruce Shapiro, executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma, writes. “Some were experienced conflict correspondents; but many more were young journalists, chronicling war and the lives of soldiers and civilians for the first time.” On Wednesday, Shapiro will moderate “Generation Iraq: Journalists Confront America’s War,” a conversation among five reporters at Columbia University. Among them will be the photographers Ashley Gilbertson, who worked in Iraq from 2002 until 2008, and Peter van Agtmael, who has been documenting America’s war and its consequences since 2006. Here’s a selection of van Agtmael and Gilbertson’s photographs from war, and its chilling reverberations back home.

“We’ve included Ashley and Peter,” Shapiro told me, “not only because they are responsible for rich and enduring pictures of both the war and its aftermath but because they represent a generation of young journalists for whom Iraq was the foundational experience in their careers.” They’ll be joined by the writer Sarah Stillman, whose piece “Invisible Army” was published in the magazine last year, alongside van Agtmael’s photographs; the broadcaster Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now; and Ali Adeeb, an Iraqi journalist who was a news editor at the New York Times Baghdad bureau. Gilberston’s series of photographs, “Bedrooms of the Fallen,” will be published as a book next year.